oric_dan:
This sounds a little confusing to me. The FTDI chips on the Arduino boards, as well as
the FTDI Cables and FTDI Friends that some of us use, in lieu of having the FTDI chip
on the board, do NOT overwrite the bootloader. They use the bootloader to install
the sketch in Flash.
Oh, brain fart. I was thinking of ISP.
You're right, FTDI can't overwrite anything.